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Radio silence

I haven’t been posting much here recently. Apart from a business trip that kept me occupied, these past two months have been spent working on our house. You see, our house has an extension built behind it: four meters deep, over the full width of the house. This is our living room, and the space where the original living room was, at the front of the house, is used as an office space. Especially now that klik works from home, it’s pretty important to have a good space for that.
And that’s all fine and dandy, but the extension turned out to lack any proper foundation. That in itself isn’t a problem, if our house wasn’t built on clay. The house itself is rock solid, but the extension has been slowly but surely sinking — and by now it had gotten so bad that we could see daylight through the cracks between the extension and the original house!
It took us (and our builder) about two years to find out what the original construction was, what the problem was and to explore different options for fixing it. Worst case, we’d have to demolish that part of the house and rebuild, but we didn’t have to go that far. With ground injections, a specialised company was able to stabilise the ground and even lift the extension!
But before that could be done, we had to clear out all the furniture and even the floor out of that part of the house. And on the coattails of that major operation, we had other building work done, and it spiralled from there. We just spent the past week painting the whole ground floor, and then in three weeks we’ll get the new floor put in…

I’m happy and relieved that the problems have been solved and the end result will be so much better than what it was, but I was not really prepared for how much work it was to clear out everything from the ground floor. We’ve lived here for fifteen years, and it’s amazing how much stuff you accumulate during that time. I’m so glad that we’re nearing the end of it all.